As you draw, your line will turn the colour of the axis you are following this helps keep your shapes aligned and work with the perspective grid. SketchUp has guidelines in place that force your lines to follow along the blue, red, or green axis. With the Lines tool (the pencil icon in the Getting Started toolbar) draw lines by left clicking and dragging across the screen. Step 2īuild the base for your house! Create a floor plan to your liking.

Move around by middle clicking and dragging the mouse, or by clicking the circled arrows on your toolbar and using the hand tool. There are also three perspective reference lines called Blue, Red, and Green axis to represent the X, Y, and Z axes.

For this module we will only be using the Material dropdown.

On the right side is the Default Tray with multiple editor and builder windows. Below is the default toolbar, Getting Started, which we will use the most. Along the top of the screen are the standard File and Help tools. For this activity we will focus on the basic modeling tools. With SketchUp you can build to scale, and/or use SketchUp’s capabilities to measure dimensions for you. This can be helpful for users just starting out in SketchUp. Under the Window menu click Instructor which brings up a helpful window that shows an animation and information about whatever tool you have selected. Some users keep Stacy in their model to show the size of their model compared to the height of a human. When SketchUp opens, there are menu windows and a blank world with a character named Stacy. Let’s start by exploring SketchUp’s interface. We will create a 3D model from our 2D drawing.

Sketchup modeling